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"PHPStorm: A Great IDE"

Every once in a while, something comes along that’s really nice and can really make your life a tad bit easier.  If you’re a developer of any kind, I don’t have to tell you how important it is to be able to find the right tools that can make your job that much easier.  So, when something comes along that makes me say, ‘Say… This is pretty slick!’, then best believe, I’ll share it with you.  Such as the case is the new IDE from JetBrains called PHPStorm (click for page here). 

PHPStorm, is a pretty lightweight IDE that’s pretty easy to use and is quite handy to have in your web development arsenal.  As the name indicates, it’s ready out of the box to be used for PHP code, but I’ve found just using it for HTML/CSS and JavaScript to be quite nice.  Sure, it let’s you change your color schemes and setup addons and libraries really as much you’d like to, but what I’ve found to be the real gem about this IDE is how it feels.

Everything is pretty easy to find, (common-sense learning curve is tested here a tad bit, but once you find something - you understand why they put it where they put it), and since it’s so lightweight, development is pretty fluid and intuitive. 

I’ll be honest and tell you, I haven’t quite done much hard-core web development using this tool yet, but for some of the projects I’ve been working on so far, it’s my IDE of choice for doing even the simplest of things.  I’ve already made it my IDE of choice for making changes to my local Apache server files! It’s that easy and quick to use.

So, I definitely recommend going by JetBrains and giving it a try.  It gives you a 45 day free trial, too - so you have plenty of time to scrap it if it doesn’t work for you. Go give it a whirl!